| View previous topic :: View next topic |
| Author |
Message |
stonent
Veteran
Joined: 07 Aug 2003
Posts: 1139
Location: Texas
|
 Posted: Tue May 25, 2004 4:40 am Post subject: Retouching the Mac 68k port idea |
 |
|
I started to think about this today after locating a nice 10/100 Nubus card for $2.99 at a local used computer store.
The 3 best 68K Macs made were the Quadra 950 (Most expandable), Quadra 650 (Fastest desktop 33MHz) and Quadra 840AV (Fastest minitower 40Mhz). Well, I've got the last two  My 650 is currently running A/UX 3.1 with y2k patches, but it is extremely hard to get new software to work on it. Half the stuff won't compile and the half that does gets random Bus errors and SegFaults.
I got lucky with the two Quadras they were both $10 each at that same computer store about a year and half ago as they were just clearing out all their CISC Mac stuff. Compiling wouldn't be much of an issue provided that a 32bit Motorola 68k target is added to Crossdev.
(nudge nudge wink wink) 
I never really thought about it until now, but Gentoo is kinda the NetBSD of Linuxes. It already runs on nearly anything with a 32bit cpu. One guy even bootstrapped a tarball on a Playstation2. (If I ever manage to get a Dreamcast, that might be worth taking a look at as well)
_________________
Inspiron 4100 & Sun UltraAXe
Portage on Solaris|Dell Laptop Hacks
The way you feel about organized religion is the same way I feel about organized socialism. |
|
| Back to top |
|
 |
Syntaxis
Guru
Joined: 28 Apr 2002
Posts: 511
Location: London, UK
|
| Posted: Tue May 25, 2004 12:46 pm Post subject: Re: Retouching the Mac 68k port idea |
|
|
| stonent wrote: | | I got lucky with the two Quadras they were both $10 each |
Hey, nice find.
| Quote: | | Gentoo is kinda the NetBSD of Linuxes. |
Nah, that crown currently still goes to Debian with its 11 supported architectures (12 if you count the functional but unreleased AMD64 port).
| Quote: | | Compiling wouldn't be much of an issue provided that a 32bit Motorola 68k target is added to Crossdev. |
Why is cross-compiling necessary in this instance? Just slap Debian on the machines and then build the Gentoo base system natively from there.
However, given the dog-slow nature of the hardware, I think there's really only one workable approach to producing a genuinely *useful* m68k port, and that is for Gentoo to provide a relatively static branch of the portage tree similar to NetBSD-release so that those users without an m68k compile farm of their own could have a hope of staying up-to-date. A fair number of people have shown interest in creating a server branch (http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.server/687). Were somebody to actually implement such a thing, it'd be great for the prospects of an m68k port as well. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
NicolBolas
n00b
Joined: 23 Apr 2003
Posts: 13
Location: Vernon, Normandy, France
|
| Posted: Tue Aug 31, 2004 11:02 pm Post subject: it was nearly done... |
|
|
I had a quadra 950 128MB/9GB and a 900 68MB/400+2GB and used them to get a working stage3. I tooks 3 weeks to compile but it worked. I couldn't release the work and i've sold the machines a few month ago , but it works fine anyway. But don't even try to get a 2.6 kernel on them, that woudl be a waste of time. They run 2.2 and 2.4 fine.
_________________
never forget that a cray is the only one arch that can run an endless loop in only 4 hours |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
royrogers
n00b
Joined: 08 Sep 2004
Posts: 24
Location: Wisconsin
|
| Posted: Sat Mar 12, 2005 8:05 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| I have a Powerbook 520 with one of these 68k processors. Is there any way to put Gentoo on this laptop? I doubt I would ever be able to do this, but I would like to know if it is possible. Thanks. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
cazort
Guru
Joined: 19 Sep 2004
Posts: 343
Location: Lancaster, PA
|
| Posted: Sun Mar 13, 2005 8:56 pm Post subject: |
|
|
Debian supposedly supports mac's from the 68k generation. I've never seen it in action though...but supposedly it works. Check this out:
http://www.debian.org/ports/m68k/
On x86 hardware, it is very easy to build a gentoo system from an existing Debian system; I've done this before. The question is--what would you need to change about the stage1 tarball? You could use the ppc arch tarball as a guideline, and then just recompile the binaries statically. You might also find this helpful:
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/
I've done one linux-from-scratch system, and it's not really that hard, although it's very time-consuming. Here's another resource:
http://www.mac.linux-m68k.org/download/
This has the core stuff that you need, the bootloader, and the kernel. It's a ludicrous idea but I absolutely love it. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Mark Nye
n00b
Joined: 14 Feb 2005
Posts: 39
Location: Ithaca, NY
|
| Posted: Mon Mar 14, 2005 12:54 am Post subject: |
|
|
| Quote: | | It's a ludicrous idea but I absolutely love it. |
Me too! I have a Centris 650 that I dug out of the back room at work a few months ago. It's really hopped up -- 2GB SCSI disk, 48 MB RAM, and a 4x CD-R drive. I've played around with OpenBSD on the machine, and was able to build Apache 1 and PHP4. I was pretty surprised to find that it actually makes a halfways decent little low-traffic web server! |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
|
Gentoo on Alternative Architectures
